Friday, August 1, 2008

Attention all you frustrated housewives, Hot Topic shopping teens, and romantically delusional tweens! The Inkwell Bookstore will be selling copies of Breaking Dawn tonight at midnight -- with a 20% discount to boot. But that's not all. We'll also have food, drinks, costume contests, trivia contests, a special screening of the anime Vampire Knight (not yet released in the US!), and a surly staff unaccustomed to working such late hours! Yes, this is either going to be a raging success (the likes of which has not been seen since that last Harry Potter book was released...a year ago!) or a fall-flat-on-our-faces example of misplaced hopes and hubris for the book industry as a whole.

Please, come join us to find out which!

Note: E-book readers will have to wait an extra day for their digital copies of Breaking Dawn. They ain't coming out 'til 12:01 EST on Sunday, August 3. But seriously (heartless insult alert!), few things are less sexy than an e-book, and you wanna-be vampires are all about the sexy, no?

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

An excerpt from Full Frontal Snogging and Other StoriesOriginally written by Alice Wignall for The Guardian UK, 7/29/08

The truth is that you never love books the way you do as a young reader. My generation consumed with fanatical zeal the works of Judy Blume and Paula Danziger and the far less wholesome American series, Sweet Valley High. And contemporary teenagers are just as likely to be found with their heads stuck in a book. Hannah Rutland, project manager at the reading charity Booktrust, says: "Teenage girls do get obsessed with things, including books." Becky Stradwick, head of children's books at Borders UK, agrees. "It's like bands," she says. "There are crazes. They suddenly fall in love with an author and are consumed by a need to have everything they've ever produced."

Canny authors are on to this and a high number of "young adult" books are series. The fourth in the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer, an American who writes about teenage vampires, is out in August and anticipation is running high. As Blume points out, young readers will read their favourite books again and again. And she knows that the connection forged at that age between book and reader will last for years. "They remember where they where, physically and emotionally, when they first read these books. They have a strong attachment to the characters. And now they want to share these books with their kids."

From the essay More Bang for the Book, written by Rachel DonadioOriginally published in The New York Times on 7/27/8:In recent years, a growing number of writers, from the best-selling to the less so, have hit the rubber-chicken circuit, speaking at colleges and businesses, chambers of commerce, trade fairs and medical conventions. While a midlist novelist might ask, though not necessarily get, $2,500 per appearance, a superstar presidential historian might command $40,000. And some best-selling authors charge double that.

The venues can range from the upstanding (libraries, churches) to the downright weird. “Once, back in the ’80s, I spoke at a ‘motion upholstery conference’ in North Carolina,” the author Roy Blount Jr. said in an e-mail message. “Motion upholstery,” he explained, means “chairs that tilt back or vibrate or turn into beds.” He learned something at the conference: “Just as fish can’t see anything funny about water, people in the motion upholstery field don’t respond to jokes, however inspired, about motion upholstery.” Blount said speaking fees helped put his children through college. “Then I drifted away from it,” he said. “Now I’m doing it again; the money is a comfort in my golden years.”

Mark Twain went on tour to promote “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and some of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s most famous essays, including “The American Scholar,” originated as lectures in Boston. But these days, publishers have become booking agents. HarperCollins established an in-house speakers bureau in 2005, and Knopf and Penguin have followed suit. (Random House has teamed up with the American Program Bureau, and Simon & Schuster just went into the speakers-bureau business with Greater Talent Network.) Beyond making money, keeping authors visible long after their publication dates and making sure copies of books are on hand, the in-house bureaus also reflect a market reality: with fewer bookstores and less coverage of books in newspapers, publishers are scrambling for new ways to connect books and readers without spending too much of their own money.

Monday, July 28, 2008

From IO9:Saving the biggest news of the convention until the last few hours, DC Comics' second DC Nation panel confirmed the rumors that Neil Gaiman is going to be taking on the Dark Knight following Batman RIP...The announcement itself came in the form of a thirty-second video at the end of the panel, which showed a Bat-Signal shining on a coffin while the words "Whatever Happened To The Caped Crusader?" appeared on screen. The story - written by Gaiman and drawn by Andy Kubert - will begin in January next year, but no details were given on where it will appear or in what form.For the complete article, click here.